A Handrolled Sushi Crash Course

Attended a Handrolled Sushi class today. Turns out that making handrolled sushi isn't as hard as I thought. You just need the right ingredients and a little instruction to get it done. So here's my own personal crash course while its still fresh in my mind...

1- Preparing Japanese Rice
For each full cup of rice, add 1.25 cup of water. Cook in a rice cooker with optional seaweed for extra flavouring.

2- Preparing Sushi Rice
Once rice is cooked, take some out and put it in a basin. Add Sushi-Rice-Powder (smells like vinegar) and mix with a cutting motion. Be careful not to clump the rice togather so that the powder is mixed evenly. Add more powder if needed.

3- Preparing Japanese Eggrolls
First, break 2 eggs into a bowl. Add some fish granules for flavouring. Some prefer to add japanese soy sauce. Add pepper and sugar. Beat the egg evenly but not to violently to reduce bubbles. Next, sieve the egg mixture to remove the bubbles that form due to the mixing. Heat up a rectangular shaped pan and put in a tablespoon of oil. Use a sponge/tissue paper to distribute the oil evenly on the pan and absorb access oil. Pour in just about enough egg mixture to fill a thin layer on the pan. Start rolling the egg as soon as its cooked (which is about 2 seconds). You might notice that the first layer of the eggroll is very thin, thats why you need to keep adding layers and layers of egg to make it as thick as you want. You can add layers by moving the just-rolled eggroll to the far end of the pan and repeat the whole process again.

4- Preparing Sushi Ingredients
Sushi ingredients that are easy to prepare like japanese cucumber and eel are prepared pretty much the same way as the eggroll for sushi that is. Just slice them into thin long slices. Certain ingredients like crabsticks (kanikama) are very easy to prepare to be made a sushi ingredient (you just need to slice them in half at most).

5- Putting togather a Handrolled Sushi
Besides having your sushi rice and some ingredients, you will also need seaweed squares (doh!). First, lay down a bamboo sheet. Then put a seaweed square on it with the rough side up. Dip your fingers with vinegar before putting the (sticky without vinegar) sushi rice on the seaweed square. Put an even layer of sushi rice on 3/4 of the seaweed square, leaving a 1/4 space at the far end. Arrange the rice in a way so that the part closest to you has a thinner layer of rice then the far end of the rice away from you. Try not to compress the rice too much while doing this. Also, try to fill the horizontal edges of the roll with a little more rice so that you don't waste the ends of the roll (you will notice this when you start cutting the sushi roll).
Once you're ready, you can now arrange the ingredients on the sushi rice. Arrange the ingredients in an horizontal line at the middle of the seaweed square. Do not be greedy and put too many ingredients or else the rice won't be able to hold it all in. Some common ingredients put in handrolled sushi are crabstick(kanikama), eel (unagi), eggroll, goard slices, cucumber and fish-eggs (sakura powder).

6- Rolling the Sushi
Now comes the hardest part of the whole process. Carefully roll the sushi starting from your side (the side with the thinnest layer of rice) outwards. Roll the sushi tight, but not too tight. You just need to make sure the rice and the ingredients are held in place. Use your fingers to keep the ingredients in the middle of the sushi roll. If all goes well a regular sushi roll should be about as wide as the space between your thumb and your index finger when you make an 'ok' sign. If you like you can try rolling a square or even a triangle, but most people just end up with a circular sushi roll.

7- Cutting the Sushi Roll
Once the roll is ready, you can now cut it . To ease cutting, first cut the roll in half in the middle. Then cut the sushi roll at approximately the width of your thumb (a little less of an inch). When cutting, make sure your knife is wet (preferably with fresh water). Everytime you cut, clean and wet the knife again before cutting the next slice.

8- Serving the Sushi Roll
The finishing touch of a sushi would be some japanese soy sauce, and maybe a pince of wasabi (for those who like it of course). Serve as soon as possible.


Well, thats an easy to follow 8-step crash course on handrolled sushi making for you. We also learned about how to make those Japanese Rice Cake things, and thats just pretty much putting rice in your salted hand, adding some mayo chicken inside, cover it with more rice, and shaping the rice cake with your hands, and finally putting on a strip of seaweed.

All in all the class was pretty enjoyable, with the instructor speaking in Japanese all the way and a translator trying his best to translate. Plus, there was a healthy amount of ingredients passed around and I'm very satisfied with what I've learned despite standing around for 2 hours straight.

On the Blanktris front, I fixed a line-clearing bug where there was sorta an infinite loop in the line-clearing if the user keeps the drop button pressed (Thanks Trickflip from Unlinked!).

Latest Blanktris version: Beta 1.6 (still in development)